Ben Bova: Orion and the Conqueror

Athens became restive and Thebes openly rebelled. Where his father was lenient, Alexander was genocidal. He stormed Thebes and burned that ancient city to the ground, selling its surviving inhabitants into slavery. The other cities, including Athens, bowed in terror to their new master. Demosthenes fled Athens as Alexander at last launched his full-scale invasion of the rickety Persian Empire. He cracked it open like an overripe melon, besting Darius’ armies every time they met.

The Great King was murdered by his own guards as he tried to flee Alexander’s triumphant march through his empire. Demosthenes committed suicide, literally hounded to death by Alexander’s implacable hatred. Alexander himself was accepted as the new god-king of the Persian Empire, but not even that satisfied him and he pushed across the Indus River into India, seeking to conquer the ends of the earth.

Inevitably he descended into the madness that plagues tyrants, growing suspicious of those closest to him. By his orders Attalus and his entire family were wiped out. Alexander’s fevered paranoia began to fall upon his own Companions, friends since childhood. Torture and murder became his tools until even the army began to grow restive.

They rebelled in a sullen, grumbling refusal to march further into steaming Hindustan. He punished them by marching the army back toward Persia across barren desert wastes where more men died from thirst and heat than had been killed in his battles.

One of the casualties was Alexander himself. He came down with a fever and died in his thirty-third year.

His remaining Companions, including his half-brother Ptolemaios, gathered around his death bed and pressed him to tell them to whom he would leave his empire.

In his final moment Alexander gave his answer:

“To the strongest.”

The surge and flow of ideas and armies between Europe and Asia has been one of the principal features of human history. In this novel, as in the earlier Vengeance of Orion , I made it a major aim of the Creators to fashion an empire that spans East and West. Alexander finally accomplished this, for a century or so. His empire broke apart into the separate kingdoms of his successors. By the time the Romans swallowed Greece, the Persians had reasserted themselves. The Roman Empire never penetrated eastward much beyond Palestine.

What of Orion and Anya and the other Creators? With all of spacetime as their arena, you can be sure that their story is not yet finished.

The epigraphs that begin each section of this novel are from William Shakespeare, King Lear ; Karl von Clausewitz, On War ; Sophocles, Electra ; and Shakespeare again, Macbeth .